Eventually that isn't practical though. You cannot take a pallet of anything on any sort of transit and never will, it will always be delivered on non-public systems. Your new couch has the same problem. Train tracks to your front door are easy to imagine, but the flexibility of roads (with cars and trucks on it) is a lot more cost effective.

Public logistics for consumer freight would be pretty awesome actually.

When I was moving a year and a half ago, without a car something like that would have come in handy. Every one or 2 weeks I would see a piece of second-hand furniture I could have used, but had no way of getting it to my new home. I could have payed for the furniture, but didn't have the money for movers or to rent a truck every time I found something.

Drone delivery for all last-mile problems. In fact, I want to buckle on a harness, and have an Amazon quadcopter carry me from the train station to the front door of my house.

This is a silly thing to jump towards in the discussion, since it's not like we are anywhere close to the situation in which we have next to no private transport. In fact, we are almost at the other extreme.

But if I was to indulge you, I would say that public transport doesn't mean rails. In the case of buses it also uses roads. And of course, if we were to abolish all motorized private person transport (again, no where even close to that) of course there would need to be a system to allow for the transport of items that are too big to be transported by individuals in public transport. I assumed that goes without saying.

I didn't jump there. The parent statement is "More public transport and less cars is always an improvement" jumped there.

Pretty sure that was you.

> I disagree. There is no need for a "balancing act" between cars and public transport. More public transport and less cars is always an improvement.

Sound familiar?

I'm not denying that this was a quote from me. I'm denying that this is what brought it into this weird theoretical extreme area.

You also haven't responded to my response yet. You just ignored it and are trying to derail the discussion with a meta argument. Unless you are going to address the actual content of the arguments, I'm done with this conversation.

Which is why you shouldn't be making the decisions.

How silly of me. We should definitely organize MORE of our society around the needs of car owners. /s

We should organize society however we the people want. That means a bottom-up rather than top-down approach that will vary greatly depending on local demographics, climate, etc... All of us think we know what is needed, but the reality is different ideas need to be floated and we vote for the solution we want to see for our area.

What kind of non-argument is that? Of course we should organize society however we want. That is why I'm trying to persuade people into agreeing with me on what the right way to organize society is.

My point is that it's a little pointless to argue on global forum like HN because it's such a local issue. You don't need to convince anybody here, it's the people in your local community that are going to make the change.

Public transport infrastructure is definitely a global issue.

Not really. From where I'm sitting in Austin I don't really care if Madrid has good public transportation or not. If the people of that city decide to fund that or something else doesn't affect me nor should they care what I think.

Have fun getting your stores stocked by trucks with no roads.

Having a baby? Hop on a train, hopefully it's not delayed.

Mother dying? Walk a few blocks, train, hopefully she'll make it.

Public transportation in American cities barely works as is, and usually only for tourists (see LA) and yet you want to rely solely on it?

See? That's the precise problem with car advocates. How many times in your _life_ are you having a baby? How many times in your _life_ is your mother dying?

Just take the car in these situations, that's not the problem. The problem is people justifying 90% of the car usages (which could be replaced by bicycle or public transportation) by being snarky about the remaining 10% (and I'm being generous with 10%).

You're missing the point.

People have emergencies, and everyday people have dire emergencies like that. Trains do not fit those cases, which happen ALOT, every second.

You want to change everything without having a solution to fill the void.

How does any of this justify the amount of people taking the car to work every day driving for upwards of 45min-1h to and back? Of course transport of goods and emergency situations need to be accounted for. Your pretending that any of what I said dismisses this is incredibly dishonest.

That should be solved. Cities have noone else to blame but themselves for poor public transportation (see California's train).

It really is a waste to have people commuting like that, it's a city problem though, not a car problem.

Yes, cars should be limited in your cities, and yes you need better public transportation, but that doesn't mean getting rid of cars everywhere.

You need to structure around roads because you need to connect goods and services to the last mile, but you also don't need to have every citizen in your congested city driving to work. I don't see why you're conflating those two.

I'm not, you are.

Buses, ambulances and delivery trucks are not cars.